My Online Brand
30 03 2009
With the whole world able to quickly locate practically anything that someone does on the internet, I’m thinking more and more about my social media life.
It started simply enough - a friend told me that she was only accepting friend requests from very close friends on facebook. At present, she’s got 36 friends on facebook. I guarantee you she knows every single one of them. She probably could call any one of them on the phone if the inclination struck her. I have 303 “friends”, and a count of my first ten yielded two of whom I can honestly say, “I have no idea who this person is.” And that’s just one metric to measure facebook overexposure. I don’t even want to think about the number of pictures that I wouldn’t ever want to explain in a job interview.
Most recently, the Cisco Fatty incident caused me to think even more about the information I send to the entire world about myself. My tweets tend toward promoting this blog and retweeting interesting information about Generation Y, but I have also been known to throw out a politically charged tweet or say something irreverent.
In short, I’m getting the feeling that my online personal brand has some room for improvement.
What I’d like you to do is take a look, and take just one minute to answer this single question: Based upon what you find from a google search of my name, would you hire me?
Search results for you:
Google results on “Timothy Wihera”
A simple “yes” or “no” will do the trick, but if you want to explain why, please don’t hold back. I’ll be blogging about the results later this week, so be sure to check back to see if other people agreed with you.
Feel free to leave your comments below or e-mail them to me at tj@generationwhy.com - I look forward to hearing from you!
I did the search on TJ Wihera, and found that I would hire you. But the answer is not that simple. There were two things I noticed. First, you appear to be involved in writing for a newspaper, and the couple of the articles I skimmed seemed to be very politically/emotionally charged. This seems to have the effect of polarizing your potential employers into the “get this guy” vs “don’t get this guy” groups. In this case, I think it is just something you’d have to deal with.
The one of interest is “Drunks Records.” It appears that you are the same TJ Wihera as the photos would indicate. This might be a bit off-putting. Now, I clicked on the link and discovered it to be a Fantasy Football webpage (you guys are very into that stuff, it seems). Now, anyone doing a google search on your name would likely not stop there and would instead enter your fantasy football site. Once there, two things could happen. S/He could determine (as I had) that the site is full of humor (some off-color), sarcasm, and satire, so the “drunks” thing fits in well and does not mean anything as far as hiring. On the other hand, it is full of off color humor, etc. so that might also not work in your favor. In any event, might you not just change your name in that site to “TJ” to avoid the risk?
I can comment now…nice.
Anywhoo, upon skimming through the first two pages of your Google Searches, I’d hire you. But you have to remember, I’m part of the same generation you are. So I understand why and for what reasons your name is showing up all over the place. But even if I weren’t, I’d do so as nothing is really off-putting. Sure, like imamclmf mentioned, the “Drunks Records” page may raise an eyebrow or two, but upon further digging, it’s obvious that its just a fantasy football page. Other than that, there’s nothing of concern (at least not to my eye) in either search.
Internet Protip: With Google’s new “voting” measure in search, I’ve found that you can reduce that chance of things you don’t want seen from appearing.
http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/07/16/is-this-the-future-of-search/
You’ve got to be logged into google to use it, but I’ve found it to be handy on more than one occasion.
hmm.
i want so much for my online brand not to connect with my personal “real life” that i have created an entirely new alias for myself and my online brand. i like it so far.